Hi Jen_M
I have been working through a few different scenarios on how to make it work. All my employees are currently on hourly rates, most full time and a couple on casual but at all different rates of pay however as far as overtime is concerned, I have worked out that I need to set up categories as you have suggested.
Knowing I am going to have to set up a huge amount of payroll categories, I am trying to figure which scenario is going to cause the least amount of pain.
My first idea was to break down each allowance I have to pay into an hourly rate however the only way this works is I have to enter numbers that are 5+decimal points long, including the new hourly rate that the employee would move to (current rate less the hourly rate of each allowance). If the MYOB system rounds these figures to a 2 decimal place figure, then my staff would be underpaid (roughly 11 cents), so this scenario doesn't work. I have also looked at just entering weekly amount allowance categories however this still doesn't work as the hourly rate + allowances still won't add up to the current rates of pay. The only way I could make this scenario work was decrease the hourly rate somewhat lower and round the allowances up to the nearest whole cent. Eg Tool allowance - round from .549736842 to .55 cents per hour.
My second idea is to somehow change all my full time employees to a salary amount (less the amount of allowances), then set up the allowances as a single weekly figure to be added each pay run and that will give the correct weekly rate of pay. Then for overtime, I will need to set up categories at a fixed rate overtime amounts for each current base hourly rates we pay. In my head this is the easiest way, still a huge amount of categories requiring setting up however, I haven't looked to see if this scenario will work with MYOB as I think the salary amount to be entered into MYOB has to be an annual amount and not a weekly amount.
There is no simple solution for this at all.